Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Review

Yates set the visual grammar for the rest of the run on arrival: handheld cameras in corridors, a desaturated London, a Ministry built like a bank in a police state. His real achievement is structural. He worked out that the book's subject is not the prophecy but the takeover of a school by a government, then cut nearly everything that did not serve it. Imelda Staunton is why the film works. Umbridge is played entirely in pink cardigans and a small cough, and the horror comes from how reasonable she sounds while a quill carves a child's hand open.

The Room of Requirement sequences give the young cast their first genuine ensemble work, and Evanna Lynch's Luna is a strange little miracle of casting. What suffers is Harry. The book's fury reads on screen as sulking, and Radcliffe was not yet the actor who could hold that distinction, so long stretches of the middle are a teenager being unpleasant with no engine underneath. The Ministry climax is muddy and hurried, cut so fast that the geography dissolves, and Sirius dies in a moment too rushed to register as the loss the rest of the series treats it as.